Born into an aristocratic military family, he studied in Herāt and in Meshed. After his school companion, the sultanḤusayn Bayqarah, succeeded to the throne of Herāt, Navāʾī held a number of offices at court. He was also a member of the Naqshbandī dervish order, and under his master, the renowned Persian poet Jāmī, he read and studied the works of the great mystics. As a philanthropist, he was responsible for much construction in the city. His other interests included miniature painting, music, architecture, and calligraphy.

Navāʾī devoted the latter part of his life to poetry and scholarship, writing first in Persian and then in Chagatai, an eastern Turkic dialect. He left four great divans, or collections of poems, belonging to different phases of his life. He wrote five masnawis (series of rhymed couplets), collected in his Khamseh, that are based on conventional themes in Islamic literature, such as the story of Farhād and Shīrīn. His Lisān ul-tayr (1498; “The Language of the Birds”), an adaptation of Manṭeq al-ṭayr (The Conference of the Birds) by the Persian poet Farīd al-Dīn ʿAṭṭār, is also a masnawi. One of Navāʾī’s most important prose works is Majālis-i nefaʾīs (1491; “The Exquisite Assemblies”), a tezkire (literary dictionary) that contains much autobiographical information and facts about the lives of Turkish poets. He also wrote a treatise on Turkish prosody. Navāʾī’s mastery of the Chagatai language was such that it came to be known as “the language of Navāʾī.”